Theories are among the most important tools of science. Lewin (1943) already noted "There is nothing as practical as a good theory." Although psychologists discussed problems of theory in their discipline for a long time, weak theories are still widespread in most subfields. One possible reason for this is that psychologists lack the tools to systematically assess the quality of their theories. Thagard (1989) developed a computational model for formal theory evaluation based on the concept of explanatory coherence. However, there are possible improvements to Thagard's (1989) model and it is not available in software that psychologists typically use. Therefore, we developed a new implementation of explanatory coherence based on the Ising model. We demonstrate the capabilities of this new Ising model of Explanatory Coherence (IMEC) on several examples from psychology and other sciences. In addition, we implemented it in the R-package IMEC to assist scientists in evaluating the quality of their theories in practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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将理论与解释连贯性的伊辛模型进行比较。

理论是科学最重要的工具之一。Lewin (1943) 已经指出“没有什么比好的理论更实用了”。尽管心理学家在他们的学科中讨论了很长时间的理论问题，但弱理论在大多数子领域仍然普遍存在。一个可能的原因是心理学家缺乏系统地评估其理论质量的工具。Thagard (1989) 开发了一个基于解释连贯性概念的正式理论评估计算模型。然而，Thagard (1989) 的模型有可能得到改进，并且它在心理学家通常使用的软件中不可用。因此，我们开发了一种基于伊辛模型的解释一致性的新实现。我们通过来自心理学和其他科学的几个例子展示了这种新的解释连贯性伊辛模型 (IMEC) 的能力。此外，我们在 R 包 IMEC 中实施了它，以帮助科学家在实践中评估其理论的质量。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。